This study documents a pronounced secular upward trend in cash holdings which is almost systemic across seven industrialized countries over 1991–2008, with France exhibiting a modest rise and Japan a substantial decline. However, the driving forces underlying the cash pattern are not uniform...

This paper conducts a cross-country empirical study of the impact of institutions and agency conflicts on ownership reforms and their implications for changes in performance and efficiency. We examine two main questions. First, we evaluate the effects of certain property rights and institutional...

This paper examines the extent to which bank market power alleviates or magnifies SME credit constraints using a large panel dataset of more than 118,000 SMEs across 20 European countries over the period 2005–2008. To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine bank market power and SME...

Several studies document a robust negative association between net external financing and average stock returns, which is referred to as the external financing effect. Using total asset growth as a comprehensive measure of overall corporate investment and total profitability gross of R&D...

The Berger and Ofek (1995) excess value measure, comparing a conglomerate’s actual market value to an imputed value based on standalones, has become the standard method to determine value effects of diversification. In this paper, we address a significant bias in this procedure stemming from...

Evidence from a wide sample of Italian private firms shows that cash holdings are significantly related with smaller size, higher risk and lower effective tax rates, therefore supporting predictions from the trade-off model. More cash is also held by firms with longer cash conversion cycles and...

This work analyses the effect of accruals quality in the access of firms to bank debt in a panel data of SME Spanish firms. The results show a positive association between accruals quality and bank debt, even when controlling for other determinants of bank debt and for possible endogeneity...

The structure of a firm-commitment Seasoned Equity Offering (SEO) resembles a put-option underwritten by an investment bank syndicate (Smith, 1977). Employing implied volatilities from issuers’ stock options as a direct forward-looking measure, this paper examines the impact of expected price...

The coinsurance effect hypothesis predicts that firm diversification reduces financial constraints through imperfectly correlated cash flows among segments. We empirically test the hypothesis by studying the relation between coinsurance effect and bank lines of credit. We find that coinsurance...

This paper examines the optimal investment timing decision problem of a firm subject to a debt financing capacity constraint. We show that the investment thresholds have a U-shaped relation with the debt capacity constraint, in that they are increasing (decreasing) with the constraint for high...